There’s a new kind of spin out there. Make a big splash announcement in a blog entry, and then follow it up (after an appreciative pile-in of positive comments) with a comment full of caveats and gotchas. It manages the bad news, and keeps people from finding out what you’re really doing.

Microsoft recently made a big splash about the much-awaited release of IE6 for Windows Mobile, and then went and hid the bad news in a blog comment. You might still think that all recent WinMo devices will be upgraded with the new browser, but you’d be wrong. After all, that’s what Microsoft implied when it first announced the new browser project over 18 months ago at the last MEDC in Las Vegas, when it indicated that there’d finally be some respite from the much disliked browser that ships with its mobile operating system.

But what the blog promises, the comments taketh away.

It turns out that the new browser, which was Windows Mobile’s main hope in the battle with the latest WebKit-powered phones, will only run on new hardware.

As the comment said:

Regarding making IE Mobile available as a separate download or update, the rich media experiences that IE Mobile 6 enables require more powerful, advanced devices. That is why it will not be available as an upgrade or direct download for current phones, but rather will be made available on new phones.

It’s not that new phones are necessarily going to be more powerful than the phones already on the market. I suspect a Samsung Omina or HTC Touch Pro user is going to be quite offended by the thought that their top-of-the-range device with the latest processors will be consider inferior to a budget ARM-powered device that just happens to ship after Microsoft releases WinMo 6.1.4.

If you’ve got a current phone, then sorry, thanks for all the support, you’re going to be left behind. Sure, there’s the promise of Mozilla’s Fennec next year sometime, or the pay-for Opera Mobile today, but that’s not the same as a first class integral browser. Is it any wonder HTC are making Opera the default browser on their latest devices?

Why can’t Microsoft leave it up to the operators and the handset manufacturers as to whether they can ship updaters (or heaven forfend that Microsoft use the Windows Update tool in the latest Windows Mobile builds to actually ship an update). By all means profile devices to see if they’re able to run the new browser before opffering a download, but don’t leave users second class citizenson the web.

There is no mobile web. WebKit and the iPhone have given that concept the kick into touch that it so rightly needed. There is only one web, and millions of Windows Mobile users have been given a glimpse of it, before being told that it’s not for them. Is it any wonder they’re deserting the platform for iPhones and BlackBerrys? The next major release is now over a year away, and Microsoft’s main competitors are streaking ahead with new form factors, new devices, and better user interfaces. Windows Mobile 6.5 is a finger in the dyke, but it’s too obviously a stop gap.

Even companies that have built themselves on Windows Mobile are walking away. Why else has HTC started shipping Android-based devices? Microsoft appears to have no faith in its mobile OS, and the industry is responding to its inactions.

I’d like to be wrong, but I don’t think I am. I’ve been a Windows Mobile user for years, but I recently switched to the iPhone 3G. Everything I could do on my Windows Mobile device I can do on the iPhone - even administer my Windows Servers - and I can do it with a 21st century user experience, not something that still feels like a cut-down version of Windows 95. The only thing my HTC Kaiser is left doing is turn-by-turn GPS - and I have a feeling that the iPhone may well be doing that soon, too.

–Simon

On a smartphone, passwords are even more irritating than ever, especially on a soft keyboard that’s so sure it knows what you want to type that the default is to correct what you actually wrote. That’s only a trimester if the phone has as big a vocabulary as you do.

For instance, when I started writing this on my Samsung Blackjack II with xt9, what I typed in the previous sentence was ‘timesaver’ - before xt9 ‘ corrected’ it… xt9 gives you the option to stick with your actual typing as long as you notice the change and the equally aggressive correction on the iPhone does the same (though I’ve never managed it myself), but it’s one more way that passwords are more likely to trip you up than keep you secure. Let alone that the UK now has the worst information theft figures in Europe, even though the French have the least secure passwords.

Switching to information cards where claims like who I am and whether I’m over 18 are encrypted, hashed and sent on demand to replace simple username and password makes logging on simpler and more secure, and makes it possible to add extra authentication. After complaining about Microsoft not issuing secure ‘managed’ cards I’ve been told to wait a few days for a major announcement; it might be the Equifax over-18 I-card service https://equifaxicards.com/imover/overview.do (only for the US at the moment, but it’s the first major public verified information card and it will soon be followed by cards to prove your credit rating, contact details or membership).

So that leaves getting sites and services to accept information cards - and being able to use them on any computer. They’re built into Vista, Windows 7 and any PC with IE7, plus there are open source plugins for Firefox and Safari.  And now there’s a completely unofficial implementation for the iPhone - which you can’t use.

Developed by Markus Sabadello, who works at Parity, it’s in two parts. The I-Card Manager (http://www.iphoneicards.com/)  shows up as an app in the usual place and lets you access cards you have stored with Parity’s free AZigo online card storage service (www.azigo.com- this is the easiest way to share cards between different PCs that you use) and see what details are on each cards.

There wouldn’t be any problem putting the iPhone I-Card Manager on the AppStore, but it’s no use without the iPhone I-Card Selector. This is a plug-in for Mobile Safari that lets you click the i-card login on a Web page and pick the card you want to submit.

And as Apple hasn’t published an SDK for writing browser plugins and won’t distribute them through the AppStore, you have to jailbreak your phone to install it.

Although there was huge enthusiasm at the Internet Identity Workshop where Markus demonstrated his application (and a petition was set up to send to Apple), the general consensus was that Apple would wait until the standard had actually taken off to integrate it. That’s a shame because, as I say, a phone is where typing a password is the most painful and relieving that pain would be an excellent way of pushing the adoption of information cards.
-Mary

When Bill Gates said that there were no more 32-bit operating systems in Microsoft’s future, he was only talking about server operating systems and Windows Server 2008 R2 will indeed only be 64-bit. Windows 7 will definitely come in 32-bit versions, but consumer PCs in the US are increasingly 64-bit according to Steven Sinofsky.

We asked the director of Microsoft’s hardware ecosystem, Gary Schare, to walk us through the numbers behind that claim. A quarter of all new US PCs connecting to Windows Update in October were running the 64-bit edition of Vista, up from 18% in September and just 1% in January.

This is driven by the falling price of memory and the number of PCs shipping with 4GB of RAM, which are increasingly supplied with 64-bit Vista in the US - Costco only sells 64-bit PCs now. That’s a trend he expects to continue with Windows 7. But as well as persuading hardware manufacturers to develop 64-bit drivers, Schare acknowledges there’s another hurdle: “we need to convince technology enthusiasts that their experience with 64-bit is not what you get when you buy a 64-bit PC from a retailer - it comes with all the drivers and everything works”.

–Mary

Windows 7’s library-aware Media Player is only one small part of a big change in the way Windows handles media. Elements Microsoft hinted at last week in PDC sessions and at the Windows 7 reviewers workshop are coming into focus here at WinHEC.

One interesting snippet from this morning’s keynote was the fact that Windows 7 would be able to offload media codecs to hardware. While the keynote referred to it as a way of transcoding media streams for delivery to network media players and other devices, it turns out to be part of a whole new way of handling media in Windows – one that more than just Media Player will be able to use.

The key is what Microsoft is calling Windows Media Foundation, a low level layer that links to device drivers and hardware. It’s this new layer that handles dynamically switching media streams from device to device when you plug in new hardware (and when you unplug it again – great for using your Bluetooth stereo headset when you want a little privacy in the office), and it’s also the layer that makes sure Windows sound schemes aren’t routed to communications devices and applications – so no more IM bings and bongs when you’re talking to a colleague on a Bluetooth headset using Skype.

One important function for the Windows Media Foundation is handling hardware codecs. The latest generation of graphics hardware contains support for H.264, along with AAC and other sound schemes. In Windows 7 hardware will have priority over software – so if your graphics card or motherboard will do the work for you, your CPU won’t need to take the strain. It’ll even work with USB offload processors. The real trick comes in when you’re transcoding existing media for streaming to a remote player. If it supports DLNA 1.5 profiles and reports the media formats it supports, Windows 7 will use the Windows Media Foundation to handle converting your media to the appropriate format while it streams.

You can transcode in software, but it adds latency – so if you’re hardware supports it, Windows will divert your streams to the hardware, and just deliver the result to the client device. It’s a sensible response to a tricky problem, and one that also means you can handle all aspects of a conversion in the hardware, without needing a CPU at all…

Specialised hardware will always have an edge over the general purpose CPU, so it’s important for operating systems to take advantage of them. Microsoft isn’t alone in doing this – Apple will be doing much the same with Snow Leopard (and is using a Quicktime plug-in to take advantage of NVIDIA’s hardware H.264 support on the latest MacBooks). This is a trend that’s going to end up everywhere, from desktop PCs to servers, to phones – and it’s one that’s going to save you time, power and embarrassing pauses. What’s not to like?

–Simon

Or Windows 7, let’s hear it for the hardware; looking forward to WinHEC.

This is the only Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference before Windows 7 ships: unless the next WinHEC returns to its usual May timing that gives Microsoft another year to get it right. I’m expecting to hear positive things from the OEMs who’ve been playing with Windows 7 for much longer than we have; 7 is leaner than Vista and it literally puts devices ‘on stage’ with the Device Stage ‘experience’ (a task-oriented alternative to the AutoPlay dialog). And Ray Ozzie was very careful to frame Microsoft’s cloud play in a way that doesn’t ignore hardware.Google doesn’t give the hardware manufacturers much love, because it doesn’t have to, but for the first time since Paul Maritz left (and he’s now playing ‘who blinks first’ with server manufacturers at VMware over whether virtualisation will sell more servers rather than fewer in the long run) Microsoft has remembered how much the OEMs matter. The lack of drivers when Vista launched and the willingness to ship Linux on netbooks may have refreshed the Microsoft memory here.What’s good about the PC? Copy and paste, as I say whenever anyone asks me why I’m not packing an iPhone. And hardware. “Both Windows and the apps are sitting right next to the hardware, the processor, memory, graphics, and disk.” You can take advantage of a big screen in a browser app, but you’re wasting a lot of the power of the PC by not taking advantage of what Windows can do on the CPU. And storage is still much more efficient in the OS, as Ozzie notes there’s “immense value in the storage on PCs for confidentiality and mobility, for speed of access and local convenience for documents and rich media, photos, videos, music, and more”.  Yes, Google Gears would like to work with USB drives and GPS directly, but as long as the Gears team are saying that “everything in the browser is inherently safe”, I won’t be installing Gears.Cloud, said Ozzie, plays to the strengths of the Internet: remember, this is someone old enough to remember the Internet before the Web and to appreciate the range of services online for communicating with companies and people. Rich Internet Applications? “Yes, the browser as universal run time is cool and it’s really useful” admits Ozzie, “but this is not the core of the Web’s sustainable uniqueness. The Web’s unique value is in its ability to assemble the world’s people, the world’s organizations, its public information, its services and devices, enabling us to connect, to communicate, to transact, and to share. ” And the phone is somewhere in between, says Ozzie. Yes, you can write software that uses the hardware on the phone - in fact, with the slower processor and limited storage you have to.  But what the phone really gives you is context - something Microsoft is trying to add to the PC with the sensor framework in Windows 7 but is unlikely to match. “The truly unique advantage of a phone-based app is that it’s always with you and it’s ready for your spontaneous action. The phone knows where you are, what time it is, so it can tag your location on something. With its camera, you can snap a picture in the context of what you’re doing. You can record a quick idea or use text or ink to jot down a note. There’s no better way than a phone for you to immediately comprehend that something that you care about is suddenly in need of your attention.”We use Microsoft’s Live Mesh service to share documents peer-to-peer on the road. It’s very effective - in fact it’s changed the way we work. It’s handy to have it available through a browser but we’ve never used that because where we need the files is on the PC (or often two, three or four PCs between use) that we’re working on. Live Mesh has just come out for Windows Mobile and the Mac (for a limited number of users while Microsoft ramps up the service). We probably won’t look at many PC files from a phone, but if we need to it’s going to be much more convenient than hauling out a laptop at the hotel front desk or in the rental car agency. And all those to-do lists I jot down on the phone; they’d be a  lot more useful if they showed up on my desktop when I could do something about them.  That’s almost exactly the three scenarios Ozzie defined last week, and they need the balance of hardware and software to work. Last week we saw the new software that’s on the way; this week it’s what the hardware brings to the party and whether the manufacturers are as positive as Microsoft has predicted.  -Mary

I’m writing this blog entry on a run of the mill Dell XPS laptop. The only thing that’s different from the laptop you can buy today is that it’s running the pre-beta build of Windows 7 that’s been distributed here at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in LA.

You’ve seen the reviews all over the web, and you’ve read the analysis of the effects on the Vista marketplace, and of Microsoft’s changing role in the industry. Let’s take that all as read, and use this as an opportunity to drill down into one of Windows 7’s more interesting new features.

One thing about the PDC, it’s an excellent place to meet Microsoft staff who rarely leave Redmond, and to learn more about the issues of programming and developing Windows applications. Unlike TechEd, it’s an event that looks at the future of Windows, and it regularly unveils new tools and technologies. We spent the week talking to people, and listening to all kinds of presentation.

Much of what’s been written about Windows 7 focuses on its consumer features - but there are a lot of things in the next Windows for the IT pro - many of which will make your lives a lot easier. New self service tools in the OS make it a lot easier to manage, as your users will be able to solve many common problems without having to call a help desk.

Windows 7 will identify and help solve problems with the new Troubleshooting control panel. Just type “fix” in the search bar to see a list of troubleshooting options. Alternatively you can use the new Solution Center to see where you need to start finding solutions.

The Troubleshooting control panel has 8 categories, each of which is full of the top issues that have been reported to Microsoft. If you look at the Programs section you’ll find tools for managing program compatability, along with quick fixes for Media Player and web browsing. All in there are over 100 listed root causes, with common solutions. There may be one or more solutions to a problem, and you’re given the option of trying them each individually or all at once. Just click OK and your machine should be running normally again.

The underlying technology is that old favourite, PowerShell, and that means it should be possible to write your own troubleshooting scripts for your own applications. It also means that you’ll be able to push management scripts to remote machines, pre-emptively fixing problems if you start seeing your users all accessing the same problem information.

I’ve already used it once, to enable the built-in bio-metric scanner on my laptop, as Windows didn’t come with drivers. The troubleshooter tracked down the Vista drivers, and gave me the appropriate download link - all in a single dialogue box, with no intervention from a system administrator…

With tools like this in Windows 7, you’ll be able to invest your time in developing new applications and services (and maybe investigating new platforms like Azure), rather than answering the phone. If your users need hand-holding, why not delegate that to Windows…

–Simon

The cloud demands identity. Microsoft has a strong, secure, privacy-friendly identity technology that’s open, easy to federate and will transform the Web and the cloud. So why is Windows Live ignoring CardSpace?

OpenID is a great tool for logging in to a Web site that you want to use but don’t need to trust. You wouldn’t want to use OpenID to get into your banking site because it’s just not secure enough, but it’s great for not having to remember passwords for LiveJournal, Dopplr, Plaxo and the like. You log into one site and tell the others to ask that site who you are. OpenID is getting less vulnerable, but it’s simply not intended to protect really important information.

The information card system is secure; it’s protected by cryptographic keys, it’s got a user interface that makes it very clear when you’re being asked to log in to a site, what the site wants to know about you and it lets you choose from a ‘wallet’ of cards to prove your identity. That gives you security and privacy and ease of use together (which improves security by stopping people using the same password everywhere. Microsoft put it into Vista and Internet Explorer 7 as CardSpace (information cards are the generic system and there are implementations that you can use in Firefox and Safari, on Macs and Linux machines, CardSpace is just the Microsoft implementation).

And since then, I’ve been waiting for Microsoft to deliver the next pieces. A token server that a business can use to issue its own information cards, and to validate them so you can use them for access to internal apps, preferably federated so you can also validate partners. And a public service that issues not just the self-certified cards that anyone can create with their public details but managed cards that have useful information that you want to protect. When you wave your passport or driving licence in an American bar, the bar doesn’t – or shouldn’t take a copy of it; they just need to know you’re old enough to have one. Put your birthday into a managed card and you can prove that you’re over 16 for a shopping site without handing over details that could help someone hack your bank account if the site loses its customer details on a USB stick, because the site only gets the assertion that you’re old enough, not the actual day, month and year.

Issuing cards was going to be a function of ADFS at one point, because it fits wither where enterprises store identity information; for development and resource reasons it went on and off the feature list and now it’s going to be a free component in Windows Server 2008 (and maybe other versions), code-named Project Geneva. Currently in beta at www.microsoft.com/geneva, there will be a feature-complete beta in the first half of 2009 and a final version in the second half. It leverages AD and SAML and x509, it interoperates with a wide range of line of business applications and it makes using secure identities easy in a business.

That just leaves a managed card service for those of us who aren’t in a big business and I’m still waiting. And in the PDC keynote today, Microsoft announced that Windows Live ID would be issuing a new kind of identity – but it’s not information cards.

So why is Windows Live ID proudly announcing that it’s issuing OpenIDs but not CardSpace IDs? Is it because OpenID is accepted by a lot of sites? So are information cards, and if you could get an identity you could trust from Windows Live other sites would be more likely to adopt them – because it’s easy to use Windows Live ID instead of running your own username and password system. Is it because OpenID is, well, open?

CardSpace is the most open project Microsoft has ever done. The architect, Kim Cameron, has almost single-handedly changed the perception of Microsoft in the identity community, which isn’t bad for a company that was so roundly derided for Passport. The open nature of information cards “just isn’t up for discussion” Cameron says (before plunging into a discussion with senior VP Bob Muglia about why you can’t constrain the scope of identity to just in the cloud or just on the server or just on the Web or just on the desktop).

Is it because CardSpace 2 is going to better than CardSpace 1? It will let you transfer information cards from one PC to another, and when you go back to a site you’ve used an information card with before, CardSpace 2 will show you the card you used last – which means that even if a phishing site accepts information cards to try and fool you, you’ll be able to tell (and the phishing site isn’t going to get the details out of your card so scammers can’t steal it). But Microsoft has adopted the first version of plenty of its own technologies even when there has been something new and better just around the corner. And issuing managed cards today, cards that have been verified and are backed by an identity provider, would be a huge step forward.

If it’s because Microsoft wants somebody else to issue managed cards because a supermarket or a post office or a government already has relationships with people and systems for handling information – or because they look like a more natural place to prove your identity because they can prove that you have a loyalty card or a post office box or a passport – then I’d say yes, but you can’t wait for that to happen. Once the first managed identity provider proves its value then banks and services that sell you certificates will join in, but you can’t keep on waiting to go first them to go first.

I wonder if it’s the legacy of Passport. Maybe the Live team wants to be extra sure they don’t rush out with an implementation that could have problems and create another Passport backlash. Or maybe they aren’t comfortable with the way that CardSpace takes the power of identity away from the provider and gives it back to the user; issuing managed information cards would be admitting once and for all that Microsoft is never going to own user identities in the way that Passport envisaged. Everyone I’ve met from the Windows Live team so far is smarter than that, which leaves me confused. Because it’s ludicrous that Microsoft has a far superior identity technology to OpenID that it’s getting ready to offer to businesses and it hasn’t even talked about how to bring it to everyday Web users who need it just as much.

Apple’s switch from basing its laptops on Intel chipsets to NVIDIA’s new 9400M series has raised more than a few eyebrows. There’s a good reason for that switch, as I discovered when I had a conversation with NVIDIA’s Rene Haas last week.

In the past mobile graphics chips have been a poor cousin to their desktop relations. Some may have the same product numbers, but a fraction of the power. With the advent of technologies like OpenGL and the rise of General Purpose GPU computing (GPGPU), laptop GPUs looked like they were being left far behind. Popular software is starting to take advantage of GPU computing, with companies like  Adobe taking advantage of GPU programming to accelerate and smooth operations inits latst version of the CS imaging and design suite. You couldn’t get the smooth rotations and zooms in Photoshop CS4 without OpenGL - and if your chipset doesn’t support it, you’ll just get an error message.

Apple’s new machines aren’t just using the 9400M for OpenGL. There’s a lot more to the chips than GPUs (though the 16 GPU cores take up most of the silicon). The chips also include much of the core system hardware you usually find as seperate chips. The result brings the Northbridge and Southbridge into the same package, using much less real estate and allowing motherboards to be less than 1/2 the size, and at the same time giving increased graphics performance for the same power footprint. Laptops get better gaming performance, and applicaitons get better user interface effects.

The MacBook’s improved video performance has been noticed, and it’s down to the 9400M’s built-in HD video support. There’s hardware support for the H.264 HD video codec Apple uses for its iTunes movies, as well as support for many of the decryption techniques needed to work with DVDs and BluRay. While Apple may not support BluRay yet, Windows will with Vista’s SP2 release, and NVIDIA’s chips handle the AES encryption used on BlyRay discs, as well as handling high-end features like BD-Live.

The MacBook Pro shows off another of NVIDIA’s features, Hybrid SLI, which lets hardware developers add a second GPU for more processing power when it’s needed - turning it off when it’s additional boost is uneccessary. The Pro has an additional 9600MGT which can be used for gaming or intensive image processing - using more power than when a single GPU is used for word processing or web browsing

So why is NVIDIA producing this new chip? The main reason is the size of the laptop market. New laptops will outsell desktops by a large margin by 2012, and users want the same performance in their bags as well as on their desks. Only a small proprtion of notebooks have discrete GPUs, with most using integrated graphics. GPUs need to compete with integrated chipsets on price, form factor and performance, so this is where a new single chip solution comes in to play.

Therre’s an interesting caveat to this story, too. NVIDIA’s CUDA GPGPU framework has become an interesting tool for developers who want to work with massively parallel application programming on GPUs. In the past it’s been resistant to talking about other GPGPU frameworks - but the Apple relationship is changing that. Apple has anniunced that it wil be supporting the OpenCL GPGPU APIs in the Snow Leopard release of OS X, and as a result, NVIDIA will be supporting OpenCL access to its CUDA frameworks. Supercomputer performance in a laptop will be a very interesting side effect of the 9400M chips.

This isn’t an exclusive deal with Apple, either. There will be more laptop manufacturers switching to this approach in future - so we can look forward to a much better laptop experience with Windows and Linux in the future.

–Simon

The other day I finally bit the bullet, and traded in my old Blackberry Pearl for a shiny iPhone. I’d been using one to write some tutorials for IT Pro, and had finally got used to its touch keyboard - and had become used to the large screen and the high quality web browsing experience. I’d also started playing with the AppStore, and had found applications like Evernote, which promised to bring web, phone and desktop together. My memory is pretty bad most of the time, and a tool that could help me remember the things I’d seen seemed to be a rather good idea.

There was just one problem - the iPhone’s camera. I’m not complaining about its 2Mpx resolution,  or even the lack of a video feed. They’re all par for the course with a cameraphone (unless you plump for those phones that are more camera than phone), and the iPhone’s is actually a pretty decent camera - most of the time. Where it falls down is its focal length. It’s great for portraits, for landscapes, as it’s a fixed focus camera that can keep most things in focus - as long as they’re more than about three feet away.

Using Evernote I found I was wanting to take phtographs of pieces of text: the backs of business cards, notes scrawled on napkins,  whiteboards. Evernote has a good online OCR service, putting OCR in the cloud and not on the phone, but it couldn’t cope with the iPhone’s blurry out of focus images.

Last week I got an email from the PR for Griffin, best known as one of the original iPod accessory companies.  They’d just announced a new “business” case for the iPhone 3G, one that included what could be the solution to my iPhone text photography problem.

What was it?

A macro lens.

A couple of years ago Mary and I looked at a barcode recognition service that Microsoft Research was trying out. Like me, they’d found that phone cameras couldn’t cope with  close-ups. They’d chosen to have stick on macro lenses manufactured, and for some time my tubby HTC Titan had a strange extra lens on the back.

Griffin’s Clarifi case is less obtrusive, with a little extra lens that slides over the camera slot in the case. It’s a workable solution, and it’s easy to quickly put the lens in place when you want to take a close-up photograph.

The million dollar question is, of course, “does it work?”. The answer is a qualified yes. It’s not perfect (but then plastic lenses rarely are), but it is a considerable improvement over Apple’s standalone fixed-focus implementation.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well!

One more step along the road to finding my ideal portable device.

Doing email has the same random gratification built in as playing the slots, with the added excuse that a lot of it is work-related and sending or replying to a lot of email and emptying your inbox feels like you’ve got a lot done. Usually though, you’ve either asked other people to do things or, in my case, confirmed what real work I’ll be doing when I can drag myself away from the inbox. After all, I have email in my pocket most of the time, I have a laptop in the bedroom….

Except. I check email on the go when I’m waiting for a message, or when I’m on a tube and don’t have a book. I use the bedroom laptop for email, LiveJournal (a mix of blog and social network), Web surfing and Spider in equal proportions. I scan the incoming alerts for mail on my main machine and only click into the inbox now and then. Over the weekend or on the road, unless I’m waiting for a reply from a friend or an editor, I ignore my email for a lot of the day. Yes, I get sucked into just getting through my inbox when I should be getting on with work a little too often, but I don’t feel actually addicted.

I do feel that far too many things that ought to have a proper workflow slosh over into email; you could save a lot of time by using SharePoint to store documents that you want people to review or using a self-service portal to book travel or update your detail with HR rather than putting unstructured info in an email that someone else has to transfer into an application later anyway. Automate the bits of the approvals process that currently rely on someone pulling out their BlackBerry on the train to give a routine ‘yes’ and you might be surprised what speeds up in your company.

Just as bad are the cc wars, where cc-ing people is a political chess move; I save it for a very, very few strategic emails myself, but then I don’t work in a department any more.

I agree with Jeremy Burton, the CEO of Serena about a lot of things like business mashups being the future of many line of business applications; they’re the Excel macros of Web 2.0. But, as I was reminded when I was writing a case study on him for an up-coming feature, he’s also the guy who invented no-email Friday when he was running Veritas. It’s good to pace yourself – I like quoting Charmaine Eggbury of RIM, who told me that “the most important button on any BlackBerry is the off button”. If you’re actually addicted and it’s interfering with other work tasks or your personal life, then maybe an enforced break will make you reconsider. I don’t agree that forcing people not to send and read email is realistic in today’s business world. An executive who finds they can get away without email probably has someone else picking up the slack, and last time I saw Jeremy he certainly had his BlackBerry to hand (although connecting to Gmail rather than Exchange as an experiment).

Does email suck up more time than I’d really like? Definitely. Could I give email up for a week and still have any work coming in? Probably not. What I really want it more tools like SNARF and Xobni that let me deal with the key messages without spending time wading through messages that can be filed unread in case I ever need the information in them.

My name’s Mary and I have 1,289 unread messages in my inbox.